… there’s this remarkable bit of writing on the subject of the American university.

The author glances at the latest sports scandals and writes

[This blogger] deplores the deplorable as much as anyone else, and only wishes readers could see how elegantly we wring our hands as each sad new story appears on our screens. Wring, wring, wring. Alas, alas, alas. Deplore, deplore, deplore. Repeat until Moral Seriousness is fully established.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm felt a frisson of sophistication reading this.

Allow her to reread it.

Yes. Again the frisson.

This writer has crouched down and taken a crap on Moral Seriousness. He has summited Mount Serious and crapped.

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SOS finds his debonair cynicism irresistable. The success of whatever argument he’s about to make about university sports is close to guaranteed.

The polemic announces itself in the title of his post: It All Begins with Football. The author argues that the very basis of our rich, globally dominant universities lies in the “tribal” appeal of their games, at which “shirtless boys” covered in warpaint whoop their way to abiding love of alma mater.

No naked tits, in other words, no money. Take away the tits and what’s a university? Buttoned up Mr Wizards, men incapable making the alumni cash register go DRRINGGGG.

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And you know, he’s right. Thinking back, SOS can date her decision to give money to Northwestern University to the first home football game there, at which she peeled off her sweatshirt and whipped them out.

The good news just keeps coming for the biggest baddest football schools, with Oklahoma State students responding to a victory by storming the field in a riot that critically injured two and less critically injured several more.

Some students were spared injury by their university’s clever expedience of pricing tickets so high many can’t afford them. The Oklahoma State newspaper’s editorial board complains:

It’s not as if the [OSU] athletic department is broke. It made a profit of more than $16 million from 2009 to 2010, and we know seats aren’t exactly selling like flapjacks on final’s week. One can notice that from looking at all the empty seats at midfield (a costly $832 per seat donation requirement is likely the reason for the lack of a sellout, but that is a discussion for another time)… Fielding a great football team does not require ripping off the students.

Better an empty luxury box than some jerk in the stands with no money!

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And if you think nobody does it better — How ’bout Florida and Florida State??

Authorities ejected 167 people from the stadium for violations. And in what police say was a first, a fight broke out among people in an elevator outside the pricey skyboxes.

Violence also occurred outside the stadium. In two of the more egregious incidents, a man was beaten and his head stomped, and two people doing FSU’s tomahawk chop while walking along West University Avenue were accosted.

You can understand people getting violent in the vicinity of the luxury suites. Not only are those fans drunk (alcohol is only allowed in the skyboxes… imagine how many more than 167 people would have been ejected if the whole stadium could drink!), but if their team is down a point or two it’s like I paid $87,000 for this box and SHIT MAN I’M PISSED.

Yes, and this blog has always been very upfront about what it is. It’s called sado-masochism.

People the world over wonder about American university sports. They wonder why professional sports exist at universities at all, let alone run and corrupt them, turn them into places devoted to the exact opposite of what universities are for: the search for truth in a civilized setting. Big-time university sports have made our universities southern Italian villages, dominated by padrones and omertà and mindless violence. All in the name of money.

People who like to live under these conditions – who do nothing to change them and much to celebrate them – are masochists. People at sports universities love their brutal unstable coaches, men who abuse their players and get rewarded for it with million dollar bonuses. They love the freaks-on-steroids players who get hopped up on the weekends and beat people up in bars. They love the local moneybags tyrant who, because he gives tens of millions of dollars to the sports program, controls the team and the university president.

Yes, Joe Nocera is right – there’s something really askew here, and anyone surprised that it features literal as well as figurative rape is an idiot.

Nothing that 11 million dollars couldn’t fix.

… a writer attempts to convey to British people the madness and squalor of big-time American university sports.

Along the way, he quotes Charles Clotfelter:

“Sport is in a way the connection with people that offsets the idea of the forbidding ivory tower of intellectuals,” Clotfelter says. “To think of the institution as purely an academic enterprise is probably to misconstrue it. It’s more than that. It’s also a social thing. We’re in both of those worlds.”

An odd statement, no? First of all – forbidding tower of intellectuals? Where? Name an American campus to which this description corresponds. UD‘s George Washington University – atypical in some ways, typical in many others – is mainly about guys in suits teaching public relations or law in the morning and heading off to their consultancy at the IMF or their gig at Brookings in the afternoon.

Second: Yes, a university is also a social thing. And it features huge numbers of sports to enhance its sociable atmosphere. Swimming, wrestling, volleyball, track, tennis …

Oh, whoops. Universities are dumping those sports to pay for football.

So why are the big sports killing the small sports?

Also, there is a drive [at American universities] to be successful in sports, something that perhaps has a huge focus in the US (though anyone who has experienced the Oxford Cambridge Boat Race can attest it is felt elsewhere in the world as well).

Perhaps.

Quite.

Puh-leeze. UD‘s a big Obama fan. But Obama’s a huge sports fan, a jock, and there’s no way this meeting will be anything other than backslapping and stats chat. Members of Congress are worse than Obama.

And… college football leaders? Cynical, greedy NCAA? Even greedier coaches? University presidents whoring after tens of billions in tv rights?

No.

As one commenter notes, “sports revenues and reputation are replacing public support for academics.”

University football and basketball are America’s debraining machines.

… you’ve got to get her the hell out.

Mr. Paterno had given him an ultimatum: Fire her, or Mr. Paterno would stop fund-raising for the school.

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UD thanks Jeff.

Coach tries to recite the alphabet.

Remember: There are university sports apologists who think the coaching staff should be on the faculty.

That was written in 2010. Add the billion-dollar tv deals, much, much more money for the coach, etc.

My point is that the University of Oklahoma football program is rolling in it. The University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma are the “two richest, most powerful programs” in their conference.

And yet like many rich and powerful sports universities, Oklahoma has become visibly microcephalic, bearing on its enormous body a shrinkingly small brain. Oklahoma, with its pathetic academic budget, its hopeless struggle to have anything to do with education, is what you look like when you graft, as George Will says, “a 109,901-seat entertainment venue [onto] an institution of higher education.”

You get a manic depressive university president who spends Monday slobbering over the team’s amazing amazing victories OH MY GAWD I CAN’T BELIEVE IT COACH STOOPS WE’RE NOT WORTHY!!!! and Tuesday sobbing into his beer about no money for, well, the school: “You have to keep the lights on. You have to keep health insurance,” Boren wailed to the student newspaper the other day.

Forget classes and professors. We can barely put food on the fucking table! What kind of a world are we living in when you can have a trillion dollar football team and no lights in the library? If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we run our little school?

“It would be a tragedy if we lost the humanities, the social sciences, the arts and the rest,” Boren stated. “That’s one of the real dangers: universities will think, ‘Ah, quick solution. Do away with all that.’”

Being president of a school like Oklahoma is sort of like being one of the generals who run Myanmar. You preside over a resource-rich campus which should be able to sustain itself at a pretty high level. But because of greed and corruption, your job is essentially to oversee a few people making a lot of money while pacifying a starving population. What a tragedy if we lost the humanities! Message: I care.

… at a tailgate.

Big-time university athletics, in which, writes George Will, “a 109,901-seat entertainment venue [is] attached to an institution of higher education,” has become “impervious to reform.”

This being the case, our only option is to anticipate the myriad ways it’s trying to hurt us, and to defend ourselves against as many of these as we can.

For instance, University Diaries has attempted, over the years, to flag the off-field fraudsters who make football so exciting for schools like University of Miami — guys like Nevin Shapiro with big mouths and big cars and big luxury boxes and big money. Before these guys go to jail, they tend to be BFFs with the university president and the coaches and players etc. … After all, what is a university if not an institution established to honor assholes waving cashwads? Who can blame Donna Shalala for falling hard for Nevin Shapiro?

But UD says that if you’d rather try to see someone like Nevin coming, if you’d rather try to defend yourself against a class of people that accumulates like scum around your 100,000-seat arena, you should do what she does: Stay current on the scammers so that you can perceive patterns. Once you know the patterns, you can establish an early-warning system.

Yes, I have a brand new example for you.

Before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, natural gas broker Paul Lawing lived lavishly in big houses and flew in corporate jets to University of North Carolina basketball games.

Corporate jets to the game… and:

In October 2009, Lawing was placed on probation after pleading guilty to selling UNC and Atlantic Coast Conference basketball tickets for a total of more than $10,000 but not delivering them to the buyers.

That sort of thing.

Oklahoma State University women’s basketball coach Kurt Budke and assistant coach Miranda Serna were killed when the single-engine plane they were riding in during a recruiting trip crashed near a wildlife management area in central Arkansas.

You remember Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous statement about some burning issue in the Senate: “Everything that has to be said has been said, but not everyone has said it.” So everybody’s saying it about Penn State. Everyone.

UD thought it might be timely for her to reprint, as it were, something she wrote back in 2006 for Inside Higher Education: THE FACULTY BENCH.